Audrey Taylor

Professor Lasley

Critical Thinking and Writing

06/08/23

Gifted Girls and the Knowledge Hiding Phenomenon

I was five years old when I was first labeled as “gifted and talented” and placed into the designated

program with other students at my elementary school. I was one of three girls in the class, the other

two of which have been my best friends ever since. We never thought much of that though, as there’s

not much to complain about when you get to skip class each week to learn about geodes or mosaic art.

With each passing year, more of my classmates tested into the program, and eventually, rather than

there being eight kids called out of class to do fun activities and be called “special,” there were fifteen or

twenty, most of which still being boys. These gender disparities seemed meaningless at the time, but

they set the stage for the negative self-concept and confidence that every gifted girl would inevitably

gain as we progressed in our schooling, as well as the actions we took to deal with this feeling. What

once was an attribute that provided pride, soon added an immense amount of stress and pressure that

warped how we viewed ourselves and ultimately led to what is an extremely common phenomenon

among girls and women: knowledge hiding.

Margarita Bianco, Bryn Harris, Dorothy Garrison-Wade, and Nancy Leech knew how much teachers’

input determined the gifted screening of students. They conducted a study in which they examined

how the gender of the student affected whether or not they were referred to the gifted and talented

program by their teacher, as well as the effect this had on gifted girls. Their 2011 article “Gifted girls:

Gender bias in gifted referrals” discusses how prior research showed that the biases and stereotypes that

teachers’ have contribute to underrepresentation of certain types of students in gifted programs, but

that many educators assume this bias doesn’t exist. When they conducted their own research, they

noticed that participants in their study (teachers) ended up making generally much more negative

assumptions about the female students they were evaluating versus the male students with the exact

same traits, which affected their being referred for gifted services. This research validates the

assumptions and conclusions I made from my own first-hand experience growing up, as well as that of

so many other girls I’ve studied alongside throughout my academic career. We all saw it happening but

were rarely validated in these observations, as we were surrounded by mostly boys (as many girls in

spaces like these are) who had gained a superiority complex from their perception that boys were

simply more intelligent than girls.

Situations like this and so many others that occur within the education system give girls the constant

need to prove themselves and their intelligence to those who doubt them, which is usually boys, who

already obtain a brazen confidence that has been reinforced their entire lives and never diminished by

snide comments or others trying to disprove their skills, like it is with girls. Guys often point out how

they rarely get compliments about their physical appearance; girls also experience this lack of verbal
validation, only it’s typically related to their abilities and competence level, driving home the idea that

how they look is the only thing worthy to the world around them. Although things are slowly shifting,

in my generation, and especially in those before mine, boys have been praised for their minds and girls

for their appearance. Often this results in defensiveness when these things are threatened or insulted.

For young boys this manifests itself in them calling out every moment of incorrectness that a girl

displays, no matter how small and even if it isn’t actually incorrect, because they simply have that

much assurance in their knowledge. Girls rarely reciprocate this treatment as kids, for fear of being

made fun of, so boys are never questioned about their claims, helping them to maintain their

self-perceived image of being the more intelligent gender.

After a certain point, the constant need to justify their claims and prove their knowledge takes a toll on

girls and they stop speaking up out of fear of being wrong and called out for it (or even right and

questioned to no end). It doesn’t seem worth it, especially when their confidence is shot from these

experiences. Any inherent or natural confidence that girls have is often stripped from them at a young

age through the way that schools and society in general is constructed. In my own experience, even

guys not in the gifted and talented program would assume they were smarter than girls in it and that

there was a mistake that they weren’t, or that the test was rigged. Girls who weren’t in it on the other

hand (but were often still very smart) immediately assumed the label of “dumb” and underestimated

themselves regularly.
Surprisingly (or not so surprisingly), gifted and talented girls have a similar self-concept to non-gifted

girls because of an imposter syndrome, the belief common among successful girls and women [that

success] “is unattainable no matter how hard or often [you] try to attain it,” that was conditioned into

them. They carry this feeling with them their entire lives, their choices being affected by it long into

adulthood. Meghan C. McLean in her dissertation The impostor syndrome: An obstacle to women's

pursuit of power theorized that a major factor potentially affecting why women still make less money

than men in the same positions as them and struggle more than them to advance in their careers is the

higher rates of imposter syndrome that women experience that therefore causes them to experience

negative feedback more harshly and become held back by it. To test this hypothesis, she studied

whether negative feedback was associated with not pursuing a graduate degree or other advancements

in one's field for those who have high amounts of imposter syndrome, and if this was especially true for

girls. Results showed that this was indeed true for women, as was the fact that imposterism positively

relates to one’s belief in the negative feedback they receive, and in general affects beliefs that have to do

with career and academic advancement. The research also showed that imposter syndrome is a large

reason for women choosing not to go down competitive tracks. They have come to this conclusion

that they’re not nearly as smart as they actually are and have a genuine fear and belief in their own

failure at the things they attempt. Rather than taking the risk, girls and women will hide any

intelligence they do have so that when they “inevitably” fail at something, they can avoid the

disappointment and shock from others, while their success would be a happy surprise.
The way in which these gifted and talented programs group students also has a significant influence on

how girls are treated, and therefore how much of their intelligence they display. Boys in these programs

(who again, are the majority) often assume they know the solutions or answers to things without

consulting the girls. They commonly exemplify fundamental attribution error, as they blame their

being wrong on the question or or other external factors, while they blame girls being wrong on

internal character traits of theirs, causing girls to feel as though their input wouldn’t be helpful or

worth saying and questioning themselves. The bias by teachers discussed earlier only perpetuates this

feeling, as they often call on boys to be the spokesperson, group leader, etc.. If there’s one thing I’ve

taken from my seventeen years in school, it’s that guys will turn to a guy who’s bad at the subject to ask

a question before any girl who knows the answer. Girls will often make up for this feeling of being

unneeded academically by exemplifying what they are praised for, attention to detail, creativity, and

work ethic, which they often feel the need to overcompensate with because of their intelligence being

underestimated, and which is often taken advantage of by guys who realize this. To no avail though, a

girl can do most of the work in a group full of boys who still refuse to acknowledge her abilities,

putting her in a cycle of praise seeking and feeling the need to do more and/or better work.

Franzis Preckel and Matthias Brüll in their article “Grouping the gifted and talented: Are gifted girls

most likely to suffer the consequences?” theorized that ability grouping was affecting students’ self

concept, especially in girls, because of the assimilation effect, “finding similarities between the target

being judged and features of the context in which it is judged,” or reflected-glory effect, “the tendency

to enhance one's self-esteem by heightening one's association with a successful or prestigious group.”
Additional factors they felt were influential were gifted girls’ preference to be compared to other gifted

girls (an already very selective group because of the increased obstacles they faced to get there compared

to men), and females being the minority in gifted classes. They conducted a study to measure the exact

effects using a sample of German students in their first year of 5th grade. They found that gifted

students being put in gifted groups/programs had a positively affected self concept in the beginning,

but by the end of their first year it started to decrease and was much lower than the self concept of

nongifted students (often correlating with an increase in achievement). Gifted girls were found to be

negatively affected more than any other group (for the reasons mentioned earlier), but had better

grades than gifted boys in most subjects, pointing again to imposter syndrome being at play. While the

reflected-glory effect might have been true when girls were first identified as gifted, it was soon eroded

by environments such as all-girl G&T spaces where standards were extremely high or mixed-gender

G&T spaces where the girls internalized other’s underestimation of them.

Even when girls are finally validated in their intelligence, they still face confidence deficits that highly

affect their actions. My graduating class had a female valedictorian, one of the same girls that was in the

gifted and talented program with me thirteen years prior. Despite her obvious intelligence and

assurance in it, she was constantly overlooked or ignored by intelligent guys in our grade and treated as

less smart than she was because of the same phenomenon I discussed earlier, in which guys feel the

need to defend their historical image of being the smarter gender. When you’re smart, and you’ve been

told you are your entire academic career, and that fact has been upheld by the way teachers treat you

compared to other students, being in the gifted and talented program, being favored by administration
to represent the school, and so much more, the worst possibility is not having that label anymore. Girls

fear this much more because of how much they’re already doubted, and they worry that there’s a

chance they might not be as smart as they thought. So many girls in the top percent of my graduating

class, including myself, would be secretive about how much we knew about a subject because we had

so much on the line; potentially being wrong resulting in losing a label that took so long to gain and

prove and that people still questioned us about.

Because guys inherently feel superior in intelligence compared to girls, they will also find it more

attractive when girls feed into this, leading to girls, especially younger ones, internalizing the need to

play dumb in order to be liked by boys. Robert Johnson, a teacher at an all girls school, discusses in his

article “Young voices ... lost” how he noticed a significant personality change in his usually intelligent,

outspoken, and confident students when they had male visitors. To find out why this was from their

own perspectives, he asked the girls to write personal narratives, which ended up revealing that the

overarching reason was to seem submissive, noncontroversial, and unthreatening in order to make the

boys feel smarter and see them as more attractive. They felt that their social role was to find a husband,

so they had to do what needed to be done to achieve that. This phenomenon is a popular one, so

normalized and put on display in pop culture and media that it goes past a critique of it to the point

that it perpetuates it, causing young and easily influenced girls to display the same behavior. The

characters Cady Heron from the movie Mean Girls and Lindsay Weir from the show Freaks and Geeks

are both onscreen examples of this knowledge hiding for the sake of getting the guy. Although doing

the same, this doesn’t mean the girls in Mr. Johnson’s class necessarily enjoyed it. They expressed that
all girls' environments felt much more liberating and free, and that they value their female relationships

much more because of this, but that at the same time, their dependence on them can often cause all

female environments to be emotionally charged, yet another consequence of the ripple effect from

knowledge hiding.

One final reason (and one similar to the last) that I will note for this phenomenon is girls' stronger urge

to fit in socially from a young age than boys. Boys have the privilege of often succeeding in the things

they’re good at simply because they’re good at it, while a girl’s success, no matter her ability, is highly

dependent on her likeability. In the article “Why girls hide their talents'' from The Irish Times, it is

pointed out that “boys usually let their peers and classmates know of their gifts, even at the risk of

social isolation, while gifted girls tend to become chameleons, blending in with the other girls.”

Eventually, this masking of intelligence becomes a genuine lack of ability in some cases, creating lasting

effects that often impact these girls’ future prospects. “A gifted girl who can draw well, will ‘perform’ a

scribble if that's what her classmates are doing. All her classwork becomes a performance designed to

win approval. But the habit of seeming less capable than they really are becomes a lifelong pattern and a

self-fulfilling prophecy for these girls. If junior/national school is too easy, these girls cannot cope with

more demanding coursework later on in secondary school and may avoid challenging career courses in

university. This is why so many talented girls under-achieve. They are outperformed by less capable

classmates who have one ‘gift’ that ‘gifted’ girls lack: the ability to conform to the system intellectually

as well as socially.”
Ultimately, all of this evidence culminates in the one simple yet unfortunate fact that girls hide their

intelligence and general academic abilities for a variety of socially influenced reasons that not only cause

this, but also perpetuate the cycle that causes it to continue into each generation, no matter how

progressive. For me, it took getting out of high school to finally stop comparing my academic abilities

to others and be proud of my strengths and accomplishments, as well as unbothered by my

imperfections. For others it’s not quite as simple. Knowledge hiding might start as a choice, but it can

very easily turn into something much more internalized and permanent. Despite it mostly being

perpetuated by young kids in school environments, and not all boys contribute to it, it’s the type of

thing that a person will carry with them forever, even unconsciously. And although we can never fully

prevent people from hiding their identities if they want to, we can always work to reform the source of

the issue: our education system and the way we raise our girls (and boys).

Sources

1. Bianco, M., Harris, B., Garrison-Wade, D., & Leech, N. (2011). “Gifted girls: Gender bias in

gifted referrals.” Roeper Review, 33(3), 170-181.

2. McLean, M. C. (2017). The impostor syndrome: An obstacle to women's pursuit of power (Order

No. 10799978).

3. Preckel, F., & Brüll, M. (2008). “Grouping the gifted and talented: Are gifted girls most likely

to suffer the consequences?” Journal for the Education of the Gifted, 32(1), 54-85,139-140.

4. Johnson, R. (1994). “Young voices ... lost: WL.” Women and Language, 17(2), 40.

5. “Why Girls Hide Their Talents.” The Irish Times, 17 Apr. 2001